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For all their talk about changing the world for the better, the Ivy League and its peer campuses generally have been unsuccessful in recent decades at expanding who has access to their transformational education.
The schools give many reasons why they can’t admit more undergraduates — land and space restrictions, costs associated with adding faculty members and staff to accommodate more students, and fear of degrading the quality of the education they provide.
In sharp contrast, many of the nation’s historically Black colleges are in growth mode, buoyed by a surge in interest and applications and ambitions to become larger, better institutions.
“What we do here is sacred,” James Martin, the chancellor of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, told me. “It’s important that many more people have the opportunity to have this upward social mobility platform that protects a different kind of future for their life.”
About two dozen historically Black colleges and universities grew their undergraduate enrollment by double-digit percentages between 2019 and 2024, according to the most recently available federal data from the Department of Education, and many of these schools have continued to grow since then. Martin’s campus, also known as A&T, grew about 13 percent between 2019 and 2024 to serve about 12,500 undergrads.
In comparison, the nation’s most competitive schools, which are generally considered to include the eight Ivy League campuses plus MIT, the University of Chicago, Duke University, and Stanford University, on average grew their undergraduate enrollments by 4.5 percent over the same period, and a few of these schools shrank slightly. Meanwhile, nearly 700 private colleges and universities across the country posted enrollment declines between 2019 and 2024, largely due to the falling number of traditional college-aged students.
While some HBCU dorms may be temporarily overcrowded due to enrollment growth, their campuses are buzzing from the recent surge in popularity and spirit. This energy spills onto the schools’ social media feeds, which feature videos of drum lines, exuberant homecoming celebrations, and synchronized sorority dances.
Spelman College, the storied women’s school in Atlanta, has become both more selective and quite a bit larger in recent years, thanks to a boom in applications. Spelman grew its enrollment by more than 20 percent between 2020 and 2025, while the acceptance rate declined from about 50 percent to 19 percent. In 2022 Spelman also added an online certificate program for working adults to reach more students.
Rosalind Brewer, Spelman’s interim president and the former chair of the board, says the college has not shied away from its mission of empowering Black women, even amid the Trump administration’s executive orders to end federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
“We are finding young Black women are more comfortable in a space that represents them,” Brewer says. “We are competing heavily with [predominantly white] institutions.… We could have given up our voice in the last year when so much was challenged, but we spoke about the importance of HBCUs.”
Likewise, at Kamala Harris’s alma mater, Howard University in Washington, D.C., the undergraduate population ballooned by nearly a quarter to 11,084 students between 2021 and 2025.
“What we’re hearing by and large from students is they understand what we produce,” says Keyana Scales, Howard’s head of enrollment management.
Marybeth Gasman, a Rutgers University professor who studies HBCUs, puts it nicely: “HBCUs are known for being inclusive; Ivy Leagues are known for being exclusive.”
She added that the Ivy League schools “tend to brag about their low acceptance rates, and they get rewarded for it because they get placed higher in the US News and World Report.”
Many HBCUs, meanwhile, rank highly when it comes to measuring the return on investment of a bachelor’s degree, largely because these schools keep students’ costs low and are skilled at placing graduates in high-earning jobs in STEM, engineering, business, nursing, and more.
Some HBCUs had been growing for several years before 2020, but the national discussion about systemic racism after the murder of George Floyd put a spotlight on HBCUs as places where Black students could count on receiving support and feel a sense of community. Philanthropic money poured into many of these institutions, including hundreds of millions of unrestricted dollars from the billionaire MacKenzie Scott.
As applications at a number of HBCUs have soared, these schools could have decided to simply become more selective. Their decision to expand enrollment substantially has required creativity from administrators like Martin at A&T.
To free up space for more students, Martin has been encouraging them to graduate faster by taking summer courses and obtaining some college credits in high school. In 2024, the university broke ground on its first new dorm in about 20 years, and in 2025, the university added 750 undergrads.
Martin is motivated to increase enrollment because he sees demand for A&T students. Employers are so eager to hire his school’s graduates, he says, that the university outgrew the space where it held its annual career fair and moved it to Greensboro’s largest entertainment complex.
Martin says the school will continue to grow. He wants it to become a hub for the human-centric components of artificial intelligence and also, building on the school’s agrarian roots, a national leader in research at the intersection of health and food.
He also sees an opportunity to educate more adults across North Carolina who need online or hybrid programs to learn a new skill or subject.
“We’re going to be looking at lifetime learners — people over 50, 60, 70 years old, and there will be a number of shorter credential programs, some without credentials,” Martin says.
It’s worth watching campuses like A&T to see how HBCUs are reestablishing their footing and proving their value in a fast-changing society. Unlike the Ivy League, which has the luxury of maintaining the status quo due to enormous endowments, innovative HBCUs recognize that now is the time to seize an opportunity.
“We’re coming into the heyday of places like A&T,” Martin says.
Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com.